Selling Today Creating Customer Value

Canadian 7th Edition Manning

Solutions Manual
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Selling Today Creating Customer Value Canadian 7th Edition Manning Solutions Manual

Chapter 2

EVOLUTION OF SELLING MODELS THAT

COMPLEMENT THE MARKETING CONCEPT
EXTENDED PRESENTATION OUTLINE

Personal selling is an important force in maintaining the economic vitality of a nation. Many
productive salespeople are using the strategic consultative-selling approach to determine and
fulfill consumers’ product and service needs.

As part of the Reality Selling Video Series, this chapter features Marcus Smith from Liberty
Mutual, selling financial services.

I. Marketing Concept Requires New Selling Models

A. Evolution of the marketing concept.

1. The marketing concept is a principle that holds that achieving organizational
goals depends on knowing the needs and wants of target markets and delivering
the desired products.
2. The foundation for the marketing concept is a business philosophy that leaves no
doubt in the mind of every employee that customer satisfaction is of primary
importance.
3. The marketing concept was introduced in the early 1950s (discuss Table 2.1).
B. Marketing concept yields marketing mix.
1. The marketing mix is a network of marketing activities that will maximize
customer service and ensure profitability.
2. Elements of the marketing mix:
a. Product
b. Promotion (includes personal selling)
c. Place
d. Price
C. Important role of personal selling.
1. Personal selling is often the major promotional method used —whether measured
by people employed, by total expenditures, or by expenses as a percentage of
sales.
2. Firms make investments in personal selling in response to several major trends:
a. Products and services are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex.
b. Competition has greatly increased in most product areas.
c. Demand for quality, value, and service by customers has sharply risen.

II. Evolution of Consultative Selling

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 A. Consultative selling emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see Table 2.1) and is
an extension of the marketing concept.
B. Transactional selling is the sales process that serves the buyer primarily interested in
price and convenience.
C. Major features of consultative selling:
1. The customer is seen as a person to be served, not a prospect to be sold.
2. The salesperson doesn’t use a high-pressure sales presentation; two-way
communication identifies (diagnoses) customer’s needs.
3. Consultative selling emphasizes need identification, problem solving, and
negotiation rather than manipulation.
4. Consultative selling emphasizes service at every phase of the personal selling
process.
D. Consultative selling practices are not easily mastered.

III. Evolution of Strategic Selling

A. Strategic selling began receiving considerable attention during the 1980s (see Table
2.1).
B. During the 1980s we witnessed the beginning of several trends that resulted in a more
complex selling environment.
C. Strategic planning is the managerial process that matches the firm’s resources to its
market opportunities. It takes into consideration the various functional areas of
business that must be coordinated such as financial assets, workforce, production
capabilities, and marketing.
D. The strategic market plan is often the guide for a strategic selling plan.
1. Tactics are techniques, practices, or methods you use when you are face-to-face
with a customer.
2. A strategy is a prerequisite to tactical success. If you develop the correct
strategies, you are more likely to make your sales presentation to the right person,
at the right time, and in a manner most likely to achieve positive results.
3. Strategic planning sets the stage for a form of consultative selling that is more
structured, more focused, and more efficient.
E. Strategic/Consultative-Selling Model.
1. The model is divided into four broad strategic areas:
a. Relationship strategy: A well thought-out plan for establishing, building, and
maintaining quality relationships.
b. Product strategy: A plan that helps salespeople make correct decisions
regarding the selection and positioning of products to meet identified
customer needs.
c. Customer strategy: A carefully conceived plan that will result in maximum
responsiveness to the customer’s needs. It involves the collection and analysis
of specific information on each customer.
d. Presentation strategy: A well-developed plan that includes preparation of the
sales presentation objectives, understanding the buying process, and renewing
one’s commitment to provide outstanding customer service.
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Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc.
 2. Interrelationship of basic strategies—the relationship, product, and customer
strategies all influence development of the presentation strategy.

IV. Evolution of Partnering

A. The partnering concept emerged in the early 1990s (see Table 2.1).
B. Partnering is a strategically developed, long-term relationship that solves the
customer’s problems.
C. Today’s customer wants a quality product and a quality relationship. Partnering
requires that salespeople continuously search for ways to add value to their selling
relationships.
D. Partnering is the key to building repeat business and referrals.
Note: The partnering concept is covered in more detail in Chapter 3.
E. Strategic Alliances – The Highest Form of Partnering.
1. The goal of strategic alliances is to achieve a marketplace advantage by
teaming up with another company.
2. Partnering is enhanced with high ethical standards.
3. Partnering is enhanced with customer relationship management (CRM).

V. Value Creation – The New Selling Imperative

a. The information economy will reward salespeople who can create value at every step
of the sales process.
b. Traditional selling has too often emphasized communicating value that lies in the
product rather than creating value for the customer.
c. Creating and Delivering Customer Value Model:
a. Understanding Customer’s Value Needs.
b. Creating the Value Proposition.
c. Communicating the Value Proposition.
d. Delivering the Value Proposition.

END-OF-CHAPTER ACTIVITIES

Included in this section are answers to selected end-of-chapter exercises. Answers are provided
for all review questions, application exercises and case problems. In addition, a brief description
of each role-play is provided.

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Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 She picked up a book that lay beside her. It was “Monte Cristo.” I had
lent it to her the day before when the train boy had nothing more that she
wanted. I had seen her read three novels through in one day. Perhaps
there was something malicious in this intrusion of a book that she
couldn’t finish in a day. Now she was reading from “Monte Cristo”—
“‘A young and beautiful girl, with hair as black as jet, her eyes as
velvety as the gazelles, was leaning with her back against the wainscot,
rubbing in her slender fingers, modelled after the antique, a bunch of
heath blossoms ...; her arms bare to the elbow, embrowned and
resembling those of the Venus at Arles, ... and she tapped the earth with
her pliant and well-formed foot.’ There you have it,—that is the formula.
And wait—here is the other: ‘A more perfect specimen of manly beauty
could scarcely be imagined.’ That is the formula for the hero. Do these
delight you?”
“Yes; it is primitive, but I like it. I have enjoyed ‘Monte Cristo’ on this
journey even for its faults. It is ultimate romance, and I think I like it
much better than the ultimate in realism. I like the heroine to be pretty.
Unless the author specifically denies it, I always believe that she is
pretty. You see I am hopelessly old-fashioned; and you are hopelessly
modern. Probably you don’t care at all how the story comes out.”
“Oh, I am not so modern as that! I do care. What I like about realism
is that you aren’t so sure how it will turn out. Doesn’t it always seem to
you like a waste of time to make them all so miserable when they are to
live happily ever after anyway?”
“It doesn’t seem to me any worse than making them happy with the
certainty that they are going to be dismal by and by. I suppose I have a
serious limitation somewhere, but I should rather see people painfully
happy than amusingly miserable, which seems to be the dilemma in
which you insist upon finding us all.”
“I am like one of those
lawyers who delight in saying,
‘We don’t admit anything, Your
Honor.’”
“Maybe you are a lawyer,” I
interposed, “and are a heroine
because you refused a
magnificent retainer for reasons
of conscience?”
But she shook her head
again. “I was going to say,” she
went on, “that romance simply
is too sentimental for me. What
you would call the monotonous
dead level isn’t so stupid as the
antirealism critics like to make out. Take the present entirely
commonplace incident. I meet you on a railway train. For my soul’s
good, you feed me with romance, and exhibit a most entertaining
curiosity. Now all that isn’t stupid, is it?”
“Thanks, gentle lady.”
“Then why may we not like in a book the sort of thing we enjoy in
life?”
“But I should insist that
all this is romance. You are
a heroine, and if I am not a
hero, I am playing leading
man just now, which has
great possibilities. We are
being hurled through space
at a speed of sixty miles an
hour. By and by a dark-
skinned person will loom at
the door and say that dinner
is ready in the dining car,
and you will let me open all
the doors for you to the
third coach ahead; and we
will eat, drink, and be
merry at the parting of the
ways, and you will twit me
for my New York accent in
the most musical dialect
that ever was invented by the Anglo-Saxon race. Yet I do not know your
name, and you do not know mine. We are two detached fragments of
human society appositely placed in a Pullman section, impelled by the
social instinct and chaperoned by a corporation. All the elements are
modern. Can not you see the very essence of romance in the situation?”
“On the contrary it appears to me as quite realistic. It all might happen
any day. I shall go on happening to some one, and you to someone else,
every day.”
“I see; it is realism because it will not end anywhere in particular.”
“Will you listen to a fable?” she demanded suddenly.
“Is it a little thing of your own? Of course I shall listen.”
 “Once there was a princess—”
“Dear me!” I cried. “I’m sorry for that. Doesn’t a story that begins
with a heroine instead of with a hero always end sadly?”
“This is a fable,” she said. “It was a long time ago, when the heroine
could be named Maud, though this heroine was not. Well, the princess
fell in love with a prince.”
“Do you mean first?” I asked.
“I know what you will say,” she continued, not heeding my
interruption. “She should not have loved the prince. She should have
loved some romantically impossible person. Anyway, she loved the
prince; and more absurd still, the prince loved the princess. You can see
how much more artistic it would have been for the prince to have been
indifferent. He might at least have had the artistic decency to love the
other princess—or to think that he did, which would have done for a
while; but he was a nice prince, and he loved the princess. At least, you
will say, there should be a parental obstacle, an old fool of a king with
other plans. Or it might be an ill-tempered queen with a bad complexion.
She would have been useful in a good many ways. But, no; not a single
relative opposed either the prince or the princess.”
“Then what on earth did they do?” I asked.
“Happily there appeared a sinister little dwarf. I don’t remember
where he came from, but he was U. C. in the nick of time or heaven
knows what would have happened. ‘See here,’ said the dwarf, ‘she will
be perfectly insufferable if you act in this way. Women are not what they
used to be.’ ‘Oh, come now,’ said the prince, ‘I have heard that before.’
‘I assure you,’ persisted the dwarf, ‘that what women get easily they
don’t value at all. You will make her think there are no other fish in the
sea. She will expect too much of you. You will never be able to live up to
the situation. Moreover, she never will feel the delight of possession that
comes after doubt and difficulty. She will sigh for something that can
come only after the sweet agony of deferred hope.’ ‘Aren’t you getting
rather deep?’ asked the prince. But the dwarf held to the point. ‘Whom
Love loveth he perplexeth. First make her doubt,’ he said, ‘or she never
will believe.’ Then the dwarf went to the heroine. ‘Your Highness,’ he
began, then dropped his flourish, and stepping close to her, whispered:
‘You are making a great mistake. You never can hold the prince. You act
like a shop girl who has won the floor walker. You have the engaged
look in its most silly form. You threw yourself at him. You know you
did. He knows you did. When you are securely married he will act
accordingly. Your mother was frantic for him, and has done her best to
help you make yourself ridiculous. Everybody is tittering over the way
you dote on him. Don’t be a fool.’ Well, if either the prince or the
princess had been marrying for policy this chatter would have done no
harm. But they were marrying for love, and love has nerves. Love lacks
that conservative leash that lies in an extraneous motive; and by an
absurd chance the dwarf precipitated an actual quarrel, the prince got to
flirting with a middle-aged duchess whom he despised, and the princess,
in a jealous fit, gave a peevish, mischief-making dowager aunt the
opportunity she long had been looking for, and the match was broken
off.”
“Well,” I asked patiently, “who was the dwarf?”
“The spirit of romance, of course, the principle which insists that
something shall happen every thousand words—Oh, an entertaining and
well-meaning fellow, promising that everything shall come out all right
in the end, whatever happens. But you can’t trust him. And if he does
fling his hand at the end and assure you that everything is all right, is
everything all right? Do the scars count for nothing? Will the interest of
joy on the investment of misery prove to be a fair compensation?
Realism doesn’t promise so much. Realism doesn’t always insist on a
wedding, but may it not say quite as truthfully sometimes that they lived
happily ever after?”
 “I like your fable well enough,” I said. “I should reward you by telling
another. But it would be a pity to spoil by any attempt at the antithetical
the fine neutral effect of your picture. You see, if nothing more happens,
it is realism. If they marry after all, it is romance. Do you know that I
sometimes have thought that life is so much colored by art that some
people are afraid to let matters turn out happily at the end for sheer dread
of being romantic. After all, marriage is very romantic. It is so romantic
that romance chooses it for the finale, for the supreme reward; while
realism every day is insisting that it shall be the dreadful thing that has
happened before the curtain goes up. Yes, I know that realism marries
too, but shamefacedly, with a reservation. A realistic marriage is as
intensely qualified as an emotion by Henry James. You may not discern
the string that is attached to it. But it is there. The author likes to leave
that reservation rankling in your mind. I love thorough-going romance
for one thing: its habit of not annoying you with qualifying elements. It
likes to stir things up prodigiously, but it isn’t mean about it. It doesn’t
describe a lovely scene and then temper the sentimentality of the
moment by having the gardener’s wheelbarrow under the window creak
maddeningly. It not only doesn’t mate a little, slope-shouldered hero and
a tall heroine with freckles, but it exhibits from end to end that antipathy
to what really has happened which is characteristic of all enduring art.”
“You are saying that as if you actually meant it. My suspicion is that
your ardor is incited by the spectacle of a woman defending realism. A
man likes his heroines to be romantic, that is to say, sentimental. The
traditional attitude of a woman is sentimental. The whole structure of a
man’s scheme is based upon that assumption. Man doesn’t like to see
woman without awe. He doesn’t like to see her belittle the tragedy of life
or to hear her say in the presence of comedy, as Stevenson said of his
‘Prince Otto,’ that ‘none of it is exactly funny, but some of it is smiling.’
Yet in spite of your prejudices, I am much afraid that the American girl is
a realist. If she consents to glance at romance it must be romance
leavened by satire.”
 “I wish that I might contradict you, but I fear that Miss America is
realistic. The worst of it is, that she makes it become her somehow. But I
insist that, broadly, this is wrong. Art and logical realism are
contradictions, and despite tradition I believe that the American girl is
too reasonable to like unmitigated realism. She is more superbly alive to
facts than any other girl in the world, for she reads what she chooses,
and, to supplement that uncertain agency, sees pretty much all that goes
on in the world. She is not so greatly as formerly under the necessity
suggested by Franklin to a woman friend, to ‘have a good dictionary at
hand to consult immediately when you meet with a word you do not
comprehend the precise meaning of.’ But she is not without sentiment.
Her patriotism declares this. Moreover, she reads most of the novels, and
most of the novels are not realistic. Now, here is a novel that interests me
for several reasons. It is a bright book. It is more than a bright book. It is
a strong book. I am going to let you read it if you finish ‘Monte Cristo’
before dinner.”
“Don’t keep me waiting for the name.”
“It has one of those blind names that you like if you like the book. It is
called ‘The Sacrifice.’ It has a heroine who has won me completely. With
no disparagement to you, she is an American heroine.”
“What is the book about?”
“Mostly it is about this girl, and I assure you that you will not think
there is too much of her. You see, I am particular about my heroines. I
can go a little haziness, or a little crudeness, in the heroes I read, but I
like the heroines—”
“To be like Mercedes?”
“One can’t complain of Dumas there. Mercedes is one of the most
human characters in ‘Monte Cristo.’”
“Is there not a touch of satire in that?”
“You have read that book before,” I declared emphatically.
“A long time ago. But let me hear about ‘The Sacrifice.’”
“The heroine of ‘The Sacrifice’—but I should not destroy your interest
in the story.”
“Please go on.”
“This girl makes a mistake in throwing over a young fellow—”
“The author begins with an old situation.”
“Yes, but you should see the way he manages it. The girl does not call
the lover back, or seek an opportunity to propose to him; neither does she
grow sour and leathery. There are certain other reasons why the situation
is singular—but you must read the thing yourself. I should like to have
your judgment of it.”
“Why?”
“One heroine’s view of another—”
“Be serious.”
“I comply: Because if you like her, that is to say, if you like the way
the author has treated her, the principles you have been enunciating are
 Pickwickian, which is quite likely.
In brief, if you justify the author
you have destroyed the justification
for your own philosophy, or what
has just been passing for your
philosophy. After all, I dare say
that you are hampered by being a
heroine yourself. How extremely
odd it would be if you should turn
out to be an embodied heroine out
of some story—”
“That would mean that I was out
of a romance?”
“Yes, out of a romance,—they
are the most real,—and if you
should appear in the flesh and
exploit your own theories as to
how the thing should be done,—
only that I should advise you if you
are an embodied heroine to go to your own author. I really don’t
recognize you as any heroine of mine. Your own author would
understand you better—not altogether, but better than any one else. He
would know your little perversities, and how to add, subtract, and divide
you. But probably if you were a materialized heroine—which might
mean, I suppose, that I was the medium and this a daylight séance—you
would say what you did not mean,—or, what is so much worse, say what
you almost did mean.”
“No,” she said, “I am not a materialized literary spirit. You will not
wake up in a few moments and find that I am a bad dream. I am quite
real. I could prove this to you by admitting that I am getting hungry.
Only a very real woman will admit that she is hungry. Does it not occur
to you that we all are living some story, and that some of us who are
romanticists at heart live realism by force of circumstances; and that
some of us who are realists are forced to yield to the inexorable
momentum of romance?”
“Yes,” I said, “and you would be miserable if you were not expressing
this paradox. The only way a woman can justify herself for believing in
golden knights and the Rubaiyat and the Oversoul is by marrying a soap-
boiler who reads Laura Jean Libbey.”
“That is a tribute to her sense of proportion.”
“Do you think so?” I asked her. “Perhaps it is a tribute also to her
sense of humor. At all events, a woman generally likes this kind of
balance. If she calls a spade a spade she likes to make things even by
saying something nice about the hoe.”
“You would appreciate that trait if you happened to be the hoe.”
“Naturally—and growl if I were the spade.”
“Tell me,” she said bending forward, “what sort of fiction do you
yourself write?”
 “If I must answer,” I said, “I myself am compelled by artistic and
other circumstances to write realism.”
She threw herself back in the seat with a laugh.
“I will confess,” I went on, “that I have been suspecting you for some
minutes. What sort of fiction do you write?”
She laughed again, then looking at me whimsically without lifting her
head she said, “I wrote ‘The Sacrifice.’”...
“This is all very well,” I said, “but you have yet to tell me why you are
a heroine. I should like to know how you can be an author and a heroine
at the same time?”
“It appears that I can not. I am no longer a heroine.”
“Is this the way you are to get out of it?”
“I am speaking the truth.”
“But not the whole truth. Why were you a heroine?”
“Because I did not bring up the subject of ‘The Sacrifice.’”
I was going to say that to the author of ‘The Sacrifice’ this could be no
heroism at all when there was a muffled rattle at the door.
“First call for dinner in the dining car.”
“The coach awaits,” I said.
 V
WITH A CLUBWOMAN

She was a young woman of dainty

exterior, with entirely modern
appointments in the matter of clothes.
She was as Burton would have wished
her, “affable but not familiar,” capable
of those impersonal confidences that
mystify the foreigner and delude even
the native. Her effect of being
imminent yet so far away, of lurking
behind a thin though definite barrier,
occurred to me one day when I looked
up at one of those emergency
contrivances in a railway coach which
bear the inscription: “In case of accident, break the glass.” She was
intensely equipped. Vast resources gleamed behind the glass. I suppose
the impression should have been one of security. Perhaps it actually was
the impression that an accident would be a great pity.
It appeared that she had just been to another club meeting. As she
always either had been or was just going, the situation occurred to me as
entirely normal, unless we accept as a variation the fact that, although the
twilight was just falling, she was going to no more that day.
The truth is that we were on the outskirts of one of those intellectual
storm-centres for which there are various euphemisms but which are
colloquially known as clubs. The hum and tinkle of a refreshment room
filtered through a crowded doorway. It was Gentlemen’s Day, and this
justified or at least resulted in a certain broader conviviality than was
supposed to mark the ordinary refreshment hour, as it had resulted in
imparting a touch of levity to the preceding meeting itself.
She herself reflected some of this unseriousness. Doubtless she would
have reflected more had she not come from a purely feminine meeting to
the tea end of this one.
“You are in deep thought,” she said, “which is very impolite, but I will
file your application for forgiveness if you will tell me at once what you
have been thinking.”
“I have been thinking,” I said, “that women like one another better
than they used to.”
She was trying to put up her veil without setting down her tea, and she
could only manage to mutter, “That isn’t saying much.”
“It is saying something pleasant.”
“A man is happy when he can say pleasant wise things to one who will
find them pleasant and wise.”
“Now that is flippantly combative, and I don’t deserve it. I have not
said anything mean.”
“If it comes to that,” she went on, “your remark seemed to me, or
rather it seems to me now that I have had time to get it into perspective,
like one of those unpleasant pleasant things that are the most irritating of
all.”
“Do you object to my thinking that women like one another better than
they used to?”
“No. I only object to your taunting us with it.”
“Will you please—”
“No, I will not explain. It should be obvious that we do not like Man
to look down from his parapet and praise us for a purely human trait.”
 “Heavens!” I exclaimed, “did I really look down from a parapet? I
never should have suspected it. It never would have occurred to me that
you would take offence at my simple gratification. Don’t you like to like
one another?”
“Stop bantering,” she said in a different tone, with her cup raised, “and
tell me whether you really think women are getting to like one another.”
“Think it? Is it not one of those things which we may know by
observation?”
“I’m afraid you are deceived. You have inferred too much from the
existence of women’s clubs. Women have a great many more
opportunities to dislike each other than they used to have. Everything has
become complicated. A man should understand. Nowadays there are a
great many ways in which women can be disagreeable.”
“There certainly are a great many ways in which they can be
agreeable.”
“There is a thorn under that rose, I fancy. I can feel that you have no
comprehension of how difficult some things have become. Take the
strain we were under this afternoon. Probably I shouldn’t tell you—”
“Then you certainly must.”
“—but we had a dreadful squabble over the question as to whether we
should stop letting in the reporters. That question has been coming up at
least once a year in the Artemis. It is a delicious sensation to be quoted in
eight papers, but it is gall and wormwood to have the hat you wore
because it was raining described in one. The other day we found out that
those delicately satirical things in the Dynamo have been written by the
sweetest little girl you ever saw whom we always supposed was writing
the lovely discriminating notices that appeared in the Flashlight. That
turned the scale. We voted to be published no more.”
“What a beautiful story that will make for the Dynamo to-morrow.”
“Do you think so? But then they will be through.”
 “Perhaps.”
“O, we are going to be very strict! The trouble is that the newspaper
people would take some detached part of our meeting and it would look
so queer. You see they have a great many meetings to go to.”
“Just like the rest of you.”
“Yes, just like the rest of us; that’s the trouble. And that makes it so
hard sometimes. I wanted Mrs. Trimwood to read her paper on
‘Children’s Playgrounds’ at the meeting to-day—it was my committee’s
day—and she could read it only at the very last minute, because she
wanted to read it at the Pocahontas first.”
“What was the subject of your meeting to-day?”
 “Well, we have to be dreadfully careful not to frighten people off. I
announced it as ‘The Education of Little Children.’ That sounded well,
and there was a good attendance. Of course there wouldn’t have been a
handful if we had said ‘Kindergartens.’ You know they are a little tired
of that.”
I was staring mutely into my cup.
“Oh, a man’s life is so simple!” she went on. “A man’s club jogs along
with about the same membership year after year. With us it is different.
Women form a club in a great thrill. They swear, like the soldiers, to
fight together until they are all dead, wounded, or promoted. But things
change. There are losses, not merely by death and marriage, but by the
readjustment of enthusiasms. Take Mrs. Montreville. She was a good
member of the Phidias until she joined the Breathing Class. She hasn’t
time for anything now but breathing. It is much the same with Mrs.
Farlowe. She took up with the Relaxing Club. You know how those
relaxers go in for things. Poor woman! I never saw her look so drawn
and tired as she has since she went into that. Mrs. Pellmore was sure that
nothing would lure her from the Dames. But some one kidnapped her
into the Ibsen Club, where they have the most charming times over
heredity and microbes, and of course she has no room for us now.”
“I can see,” I said, “that this might make things very difficult.”
“Difficult! Why, the Progressive Woman is a perfect blur. There was a
time when all clubs looked alike to women. Nowadays we have become
discriminating and there is no peace. The competition is frightful. It is no
longer a matter of wafers. You can’t lure them with things to eat. They
want sensations.”
“It really is too bad,” I said. “You will have to organize a trust and
fight these yellow clubs.”
“As for that, it is pretty hard to find a club without a streak of yellow
in it. We’ve got to work in a vein of novelty somehow. They call it
making the club attractive. The Phidias went in for Shakespeare at first.
Then we found that in order to get new members we had to take up
Browning too. That was well enough for a while. When the younger
members got restless, we had Miss de Villeforte Volé lecture to us on
‘Degeneracy.’ This delighted everybody except Mrs. Bentwell, who
lectures herself on ‘The Ascent of Man.’ After that we had some talks by
Professor Prinks on the ‘Marriage Customs of Central Africa.’ There
were some criticisms of this. We are bound to have objectors, and sub-
objectors—women like Mrs. Prittle—do you know Mrs. Prittle? No?
Well, Mrs. Prittle is one of those gorgeously upholstered women who
rise with a tremendous rustling and ‘agree with what the last speaker has
said.’ Just now there is a row on because some of them want to take up
the North Pole.”
“What on earth do they want to do with that?” I demanded.
“I haven’t the least idea. Probably they haven’t. But they would tell
you that there isn’t anything else left.”
“Anything else left?”
“You see, things last such a little while, at least with the quick clubs.
Why, the Thursday Club did the ‘Origin of Species’ and ‘First
Principles’ in one afternoon. We call ourselves very deliberate at the
Phidias; that is to say, we never have more than one topic for a meeting;
but we shall do Schopenhauer’s works to-morrow morning after our
annual business meeting.”
Something in my look must have excited her suspicion, for she went
on: “But I absolutely forbid your commiseration. Except for the strain of
the competition, it all is very nice, I assure you. We have beautiful
times.”
“Of course you do,” I hastened to say. “Even a man can see that. Do
you suppose that a man who had done Sienkiewicz and d’Annunzio and
Pestalozzi this afternoon, and was going to do Pythagoras, prison reform,
the Brahmanas, the Zend-Avesta and bimetallism to-morrow morning,
could look as well as you do?”
“I suppose,” she said, looking at me with her laughing, unperplexed
eyes, “that we can do these things because we can do more with our
subjective minds than you can.”
“So you have been at the Subjective Minds too?”
“One can’t get along at all nowadays without psychology. How should
we ever have got back to ghost stories again without it? We had a
delightful ghost afternoon at the Artemis. Then it all seems to come in
well with the astral body business. Isn’t it a pity that we can’t be in
several places at the same time?”
“You wouldn’t ask that the tea-drinking part of us should be in more
than one place at a time?”
 “Not necessarily. The tea-drinking part of us will look out for itself.
Just now you had a far-away look. The other part of you was somewhere
else—perhaps at your club.”
“No, no! I never was more completely present in my life.”

“Anyway, see how nice it would be if that other part of you could be
off comfortably somewhere while this part was here, holding an empty
cup, and preserving the outward appearance of listening to a young
woman prattle about the momentous concerns of life.... Oh, there’s Mrs.
Crasker! Do you know her? No? You should. She would tell you the
most interesting things. She organized the Zodiac Club last spring and
we all were studying the signs for a month or two. It really was
wonderful. She told me that as I was a Pisces girl I must marry in the
sign of Virgo or Capricorn. It was immensely interesting to study all
your friends that way, to see why they shouldn’t have married the one
they did. But of course you never could make a club that would stay put
on such a basis as that. There was no way of dodging the facts. One may
forget one’s age, but one can not elude one’s birthday. And there is no
way of shifting it. When the woman whom we elected Vice President
turned out by her birthday to be under the sign of—Taurus, was it?—it
upset her to find that she must be inordinately fond of dress, that she
would do anything for clothes, and so on. Why, it was like turning the X-
ray on us. And we found that we all were wearing the wrong colors. The
deeper we got into the thing the more impossible it began to seem that
we ever should club well together, however much the awful discoveries
might be expected to affect the general question of friendship.”
“I will forgive you everything,” I said, “if you will entertain and
enlighten me with an answer to a momentous question, namely: How are
clubs to be explained—by which, of course, I mean feminine clubs.”
For answer to this she gave a little laugh which at first I was at a loss
to explain. Then I saw she was looking across the room toward a tall,
rather heavy woman encased in black jet.
“There is a woman,” she finally said, “who might give you one answer
to that question.”
“Do you mean that now you are going to give me her answer?”
“I could only guess at that. But I might tell you a story.”
“About her?”
“About her.”
“That wouldn’t be gossip, would it?”
“Oh, no! it would be history. You know her name is Ellen—Ellen
Brotcher. She was a Miss Gatt. I’m sure she always has wished that she
was a Louise-Florence-Petronille-Tardien d’Escavelles or a Julie-Jeanne-
Eléonore de Lespinasse. She was very ambitious. That is to say, she
thought she was—coaxed herself to believe that she was. It all began by
her taking up French; perhaps I should say, taking up a little French